"The simplest explanation that your consciousness cannot be found in your brain or your body is that you are not in it"
"You are not in your body, your body is in you ... you are not in the world, the world is in you"

(which is btw a statement often repeated by Ramana Maharshi too ...)

Deepak Chopra calls the unresolved scientific issue of consciousness "the hard problem of consciousness" ... no scientific observation or theory can explain the existence of consciousness ... because consciousness is a 'subjective' experience and cannot be addressed by science which only deals with 'objective' knowledge ... (ie. knowledge of 'objects' considered as separate from the observer (consciousness) ... which is the basic assumption/axiom of science ie. an observable 'objective' world independant from the observer ...

"What irritates us about others is an opportunity to learn on ourselves"
(Carl Jung)

There is absolutely no evidence of a hard problem. This is speculation by some philosophers, such as key proponent David Chalmers. Chalmers doesn't like the idea that Consciousness may be explained fully.... by "purely" objective means.... such as a neural basis of Consciousness.

Chalmers speculates that Consciousness may be a primary essence, and that everything including even light "photons" carries some level of Consciousness. But offers absolutely no hard evidence for such theories. Chalmers also equates information with Consciousness. Therefore, a photon is a carry of information and for this reason also carries Consciousness.

IMO, there is no hard problem of consciousness. I think its enough to explain all of consciousness by objective behaviour.

ashley72 wrote:
IMO, there is no hard problem of consciousness. I think its enough to explain all of consciousness by objective behaviour.

Ashley,

Deepak Chopra explains that you cannot find any 'image' in the brain, nothing in the brain contains an image, you only get there biochemical reactions, electrical signals etc ... the image itself is NOT in the brain, but in consciousness ... and consciousness itself is NOT in the brain ... because consciousness is non-local ... in other words : formless ...

"What irritates us about others is an opportunity to learn on ourselves"
(Carl Jung)

Deepak Chopra explains that you cannot find any 'image' in the brain, nothing in the brain contains an image, you only get there biochemical reactions, electrical signals etc ... the image itself is NOT in the brain, but in consciousness ... and consciousness itself is NOT in the brain ... because consciousness is non-local ... in other words : formless ...

If you look inside a computer you won't find an image either. You will find many transistors (binary states). That's the same in the brain, you have many neurons that are holding a "state"... but are synaptic (graded weight representations) rather than binary.

Each optic nerve has between 770,000 to 1.7 million axons (nerve cell) conducting electric pulses.

The light which is an electromagnetic wave carries information about the object it reflects off. The light goes through the pupil and triggers the photoreceptors (nerve cells) which fire electric pulses that build the visual scene in your neural network (visual cortex). It's a lot more complex than this in reality but this is the basic visual process.

In 2008 IBM applied for a patent on how to extract mental images of human faces from the human brain. It uses a feedback loop based on brain measurements of the fusiform gyrus area in the brain which activates proportionate with degree of facial recognition.

How does one person look at data and sees neurons firing, and another looking at the same data and sees consciousness? How do two people watching a sporting event have different emotional reactions to the same score, yet a third feels nothing at all?

It would seem data firing, given the exact same input, like transistors in a computer, would always produce the same result. And the last time I checked, my computer didn't get pissed off and start crying because I yelled at it.

Webwanderer wrote:How does one person look at data and sees neurons firing, and another looking at the same data and sees consciousness? How do two people watching a sporting event have different emotional reactions to the same score, yet a third feels nothing at all?

It would seem data firing, given the exact same input, like transistors in a computer, would always produce the same result. And the last time I checked, my computer didn't get pissed off and start crying because I yelled at it.

WW

It's called unsupervised learning... In machine learning speak.

No two agents will be identical if each agent learns from different training data just as humans do.

If you had two robots and you just let them roam around freely for 25 years interacting in the environment, each robot would have a similar yet unique understanding of the physical environment.

Would they cry about it? Would they respect each other? Would they celebrate their uniqueness? Would they be jealous? Would they care? Would they feel anything?...Could they? Consciousness isn't just data flow and accumulation.

Oh sure, the Hard Problem is only 'speculation' by some philosophers. That's a great way to win an argument. State something nonsensical like that in order to avoid the issue.

It's not like there are any theoretical physicists or other hundreds of other scientists who've acknowledged this and still are trying to get to the bottom of this. It's only a few of those 'weird' philosophers.

That's a funny one. I needed that one today for a good laugh.

Phil, Deepok Chopra is not the one that coined the term. I don't think he's a legitimate source either for anything spiritual or scientific. He got schooled by Stuart Hameroff in a scientific debate and pretty much sounds like he just regurgitates spiritual ideas and profits off of it. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get of him.

I'd recommend theoretical physicist Peter Russell who has an eastern background as well, if you really want to look into the Hard Problem.

"Don't try to reduce consciousness to some more basic things ... consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, the way that space and time and mass are. Once you have done that you can build a fantastic science of consciousness in the way we have developped a science of space and time ..."

So consciousness needs no explanation, cannot be explained ... but rather consciousness is what explains all things ...

"What irritates us about others is an opportunity to learn on ourselves"
(Carl Jung)

Enlightened2B wrote:Oh sure, the Hard Problem is only 'speculation' by some philosophers. That's a great way to win an argument. State something nonsensical like that in order to avoid the issue.

It's not like there are any theoretical physicists or other hundreds of other scientists who've acknowledged this and still are trying to get to the bottom of this. It's only a few of those 'weird' philosophers.

That's a funny one. I needed that one today for a good laugh.

Phil, Deepok Chopra is not the one that coined the term. I don't think he's a legitimate source either for anything spiritual or scientific. He got schooled by Stuart Hameroff in a scientific debate and pretty much sounds like he just regurgitates spiritual ideas and profits off of it. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get of him.

I'd recommend theoretical physicist Peter Russell who has an eastern background as well, if you really want to look into the Hard Problem.

Peter Russell is just as ill equipped to talk about the "hard problem" as much as the other philosophers with an Eastern slant. Because it's purely speculation, based on absolutely no objective evidence whatsoever. There is no empirical evidence gathering planned in the far off future because frankly there is no conceivable way of proving Consciousness is primary, it's equivalent to pie in the sky stuff.

I don't know why people even waste their time arguing about theories that have no future conceivable outcomes.

What I'm pointing to here isn't mere speculation. Machine learning agents have already been built and physically tested... and demonstrated to work. Whilst artificial brains that are loosely based an the mammalian brains are already in the early stages of construction & physical testing.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? ~ Robert Kennedy

Phil2 wrote:
So consciousness needs no explanation, cannot be explained ... but rather consciousness is what explains all things ...

What you doing here is turning Consciousness into a term with the same broad meaning as Reality.

Being conscious means being aware of the environment. Now a thermostatically controlled furnace is aware (senses) the room temperature and can switch off/on based on its set temperature. So I guess you could argue that even a furnace is ever so slightly conscious. Is that what your doing here?

Webwanderer wrote:Would they cry about it? Would they respect each other? Would they celebrate their uniqueness? Would they be jealous? Would they care? Would they feel anything?...Could they? Consciousness isn't just data flow and accumulation.

WW

If you wanted those traits it's theoretically possible... But businesses or institutions aren't going to spend millions of dollars replicating these kinds of features in artificial machines if there isn't a realistic financial return.

Future artificial machines will be built to do tasks that humans are ill equipped to do. Google is currently deploying machine learning computers that watch over large information networks. Learning tasks such as how to configure the network into the lowest possible energy consumption. These machines are conscious of only what is essential, so there is no possibility of the machine being caught sleeping on the job!